Bibble 5 was released a few days ago. I used to be an enthusiastic user of Bibble 4, but over the last year I have transitioned to Raw Developer for most of my work, having never really liked ACR and not wanting to spend my time working with a beta product in order to be able to use my new cameras.

I did download Bibble 5 and it looks promising, definitely a complete update from the previous version. Haven't had much time to play with it yet, so I really cannot say how it compares to the other tools I routinely use.

I'd be delighted to see Bibble remain a viable alternative, but the long development delay seems to have deflated some of the enthusiasm that used to surround the program.

Stefano, I have to agree that in terms of rendering quality, Raw Developer is on the top of my list.

I haven't tried the released version of Bibble 5 but will when time permits.

I have the new Bibble 5 and I can verify that it is blazing fast and produces great detail with out artifacts. I have not adjusted to the new tools yet but the workflow looks promising. I was an ardent Bibble user in the days before ACR but there were some issues and I went with ACR when those could not be resolved. The highlight control was the biggest problem before but now highlight rendering is excellent and things like rendering tree limbs against a bright background are very good as well. Does everyone remember where Vibrance,Fill light, and highlight recovery first made their appearance? That is right Bibble 4. I am looking forward to see what Andrew and the other digital experts have to say about the quality of the conversions. I do not consider myself a very nuanced observer.

Sorry? Lightroom can't use multiple CPUs? That's a load of ****. Many years ago, applications had to be written specifically to use multiple CPUs, with things like the SMP libraries, etc. Those days are LONG gone. All an application requires to take advantage of multiple CPUs is to be written with multiple threads. I've just started LR, without doing any work at all, and it's already using 18 threads.

Sorry? Lightroom can't use multiple CPUs? That's a load of ****. Many years ago, applications had to be written specifically to use multiple CPUs, with things like the SMP libraries, etc. Those days are LONG gone. All an application requires to take advantage of multiple CPUs is to be written with multiple threads. I've just started LR, without doing any work at all, and it's already using 18 threads.

We then come to the question of how well the application is programmed to take advantage of multiple threads. It may be some time before there is any RAW converter that makes use of multiple cores anywhere near as well as Bibble 5. It is extremely efficient.

I have upgraded to a MacPro with four cores, hyperthreading and 16 GByte of memory. LR certainly uses multiple CPUs on my computer. If it's done efficiently? I don't know.

Just having threads is not enough to utilize multiprocessing, the threads need to be active and doing useful work.

Best regardsErik

Quote from: ajtaylor

Sorry? Lightroom can't use multiple CPUs? That's a load of ****. Many years ago, applications had to be written specifically to use multiple CPUs, with things like the SMP libraries, etc. Those days are LONG gone. All an application requires to take advantage of multiple CPUs is to be written with multiple threads. I've just started LR, without doing any work at all, and it's already using 18 threads.

Sorry? Lightroom can't use multiple CPUs? That's a load of ****. Many years ago, applications had to be written specifically to use multiple CPUs, with things like the SMP libraries, etc. Those days are LONG gone. All an application requires to take advantage of multiple CPUs is to be written with multiple threads. I've just started LR, without doing any work at all, and it's already using 18 threads.

Multiple processor support isn’t really the bottleneck from what I’ve been told. Its getting data to and from the processors (asking for all that 5DMII data as an example going to and from the processors).

We then come to the question of how well the application is programmed to take advantage of multiple threads. It may be some time before there is any RAW converter that makes use of multiple cores anywhere near as well as Bibble 5. It is extremely efficient.

How do you know? Unless you've either seen the code or can use dtruss (on the Mac, similar stuff available for Windows) to track what each thread is doing, you're basing this assumption on how it feels. There are lots of tricks that one can do to make an application appear faster or more efficient than it actually is, e.g. render the screen preview/thumbnail, show that to the user straight away, but defer processing the "real" image data. The difference in processing time between 100k preview and 14Mb RAW is going to be significant. I'm not suggesting Bibble resorts to trickery (although the example I quote is a fairly logical way for a RAW editor to work) or that it is inefficient.